In his 2010 book, The Shallows, Nicholas Carr prophetically claimed, “Our use of the Net will only grow, and its impact on us will only strengthen, as it becomes ever more present in our lives.” A decade before 91 percent of Americans had the internet in their pockets, Carr’s concern with the internet as a “tool of the mind” was that it numbed “the most intimate, the most human, of our natural capacities—those for reason, perception, memory, emotion.”
In his latest book, Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, Carr, an American journalist, traces the history of how our communication technologies got to where they are today, and more importantly, the effect of what we might call the industrialization of communication.
Carr shows that contemporary communication technologies transform “how we talk, how we see other people, how we experience the world” (78). Of grave concern for Carr is that the technologies promising to fuel more personal connections are making it harder to form healthy relationships. They’re like the ultraprocessed foods of human relations. Yet his proposed solution is encouraging as he calls for a return to an embodied experience of the world.
Ultraprocessed Communication
I love Watermelon Sour Patch Kids. These fruit-shaped gobs of goodness are the definition of an ultraprocessed food, a food-like substance alchemized from the liquefied version of a real food (like high-fructose corn syrup) and industrial chemicals (like titanium dioxide). I don’t like Sour Patch Kids because they’re good for me but because they taste good to me. And that’s exactly the point. Ultraprocessed foods are engineered to be hyperconsumable and hyperpalatable; no nutrients, all pleasure.
Like food, communication has undergone its own industrialization process.
Like food, communication has undergone its own industrialization process.
For much of history, communication moved only as fast as humans and their modes of transport—on foot or horseback, by boat or train. The invention of the telegraph was revolutionary, enabling messages to travel over electrical wires at speeds far beyond human capability. To achieve such efficiency, messages were reduced to simple codes, laying the groundwork for their eventual reduction into binary—1s and 0s, the building blocks of digital information.
Once messages are translated to the language of the machine, they lose all their human “nutrients.” The tone, the pace, and the quirky facial expression are all liquefied down into a metaphorical corn syrup of digital bits. The congratulatory message from grandma, the video of a terrorist attack, and the latest cat meme are flattened into the category of “content.” Stripped of their humanness, messages can more easily be subjected to the industrial imperatives of optimization and efficiency.
Feeding Our Addiction
After the telegraph reduced messages and replaced humans as message carriers, the next human inefficiency targeted for optimization was the editorial function. Enter the algorithmic news feed, whose sole purpose is maximizing engagement. These algorithms deliver “whatever patterns of 0s and 1s [are] calculated to have the highest probability of grabbing and holding people’s attention” (64).
When machines become editors, messages are prioritized for engagement metrics over meaning. Much like Sour Patch Kids are engineered to evoke exaggerated pleasure, industrialized communication is designed to manipulate human responses. Carr warns, “Whether we realize it or not, social media churns out information that’s been highly processed to stimulate not just engagement but dependency” (77).
In the industrialization process, the machine became the carrier and the curator. The last and final step to reduce inefficiencies is for the machine to become the creator as well. Carr writes, “Once we’ve compressed language as far as it can go, the only way to gain greater conversational efficiency is to automate speech, letting prediction algorithms and chatbots choose our words” (191). The internet giant Meta has already rolled out AI profiles to a chorus of mockery. However, if engagement—positive or negative—with the bots increases, their survival is guaranteed.
We like ultraprocessed communication even though it isn’t good for us, because it tastes good. Some of us may criticize what has become of human communication, but at the end of the day, we kind of like it.
Corruption at Light Speed
We contribute to our corruption. As Carr notes,
It’s important to be honest about our own complicity. We’re not being manipulated to act in opposition to our desires. We’re not hostages with Stockholm syndrome. We’re being given what we want, in quantities so generous we can’t resist gorging ourselves. The manipulation is secondary to and dependent on the pleasure. (216)
Thus social media—perhaps the most ultraprocessed communication form—doesn’t create the worst desires in us like anger, division, lust, pride, gossip, slander, and approval-seeking. It simply feeds the sin nature that’s within us already and publishes it on our feeds for all to see (see Rom. 7:13–25).
It’s not that good desires are never revealed online but that the lesser desires are revealed quicker and typically go further, faster. Videos of disaster relief efforts can’t compete with road-rage highlights. The worst elements of our nature are encouraged before we can think about the consequences.
Efficient, industrialized communication allows desire to be conceived and sin to be birthed at the speed of a retweet. It’s tough to resist the corrupting effects of this ultraprocessed communication because it comes at us so fast. As Carr notes, “The computer is so quick to sense and fulfill our desires that it never allows us the opportunity to examine our desires, to ask ourselves whether what we choose, or what is chosen for us, is worthy of the choosing” (231–32). We need to figure out a way to overcome this high-speed challenge.
Return to Embodiment
Most of Carr’s book focuses on the problem, but in the final pages, we find the rough outline of a path forward. For Carr, the only way to escape the “[prison of] the hyperreal” is by embracing the one quality that distinguishes humans from machines: worldliness, by which he means physical embodiment. He writes, “Despite our love of or at least infatuation with the easy stimulations of the virtual, we can never make a true home there, at least not without sacrificing the qualities of sense and sensibility that make us most ourselves” (231). We need to spend more time in the real, physical world than online.
Though Carr makes no claim to be a Christian, his argument should come as no surprise to us. Our understanding of reality is tied to Christ’s incarnation. As words become more inhuman, the way out is to follow the path of the Word who became human. The incarnate Word made us more fully human, so we must make our speech more human through incarnate words. This is why tweets to 10,000 followers around the globe don’t satiate like a sermon given to the 100 congregants you pastor. It’s why a check-in text rings hollow compared to a bedside hospital visit.
As words become more inhuman, the way out is to follow the path of the Word who became human.
If we’re going to avoid the effects of ultraprocessed communication, we’re going to have to choose to be embodied with others. We needn’t abandon the virtual world entirely, but, as Carr argues, we must find a place “beyond the reach of its liquefying force” (232). That may put us on the world’s margins in some ways, but there’s little benefit for us to gain the digital world at the expense of our souls (Matt. 16:26). At times alarming, Superbloom is a profound reminder of what’s at stake if we consume only ultraprocessed communication at the expense of real, embodied community.
The Gospel Coalition